Thursday, October 23, 2014

There is nothing good or bad...

In his book The Swastika: Symbol Beyond Redemption? US graphic design
writer Steven Heller shows how it was enthusiastically adopted in the
West as an architectural motif, on advertising and product design.

"Coca-Cola used it. Carlsberg used it on their beer bottles. The Boy
Scouts adopted it and the Girls' Club of America called their magazine
Swastika. They would even send out swastika badges to their young
readers as a prize for selling copies of the magazine," he says.

It was used by American military units during World War One
and it could be seen on RAF planes as late as 1939. Most of these benign
uses came to a halt in the 1930s as the Nazis rose to power in Germany.

In fact, its use goes back thousands of years before Adolph Hitler was even born.

Single swastikas began to appear in the Neolithic Vinca culture across
south-eastern Europe around 7,000 years ago. But it's in the Bronze Age
that they became more widespread across the whole of Europe. In the
[Ukrainian National History] Museum's collection there are clay pots with single swastikas encircling
their upper half which date back to around 4,000 years ago. When the
Nazis occupied Kiev in World War Two they were so convinced that these
pots were evidence of their own Aryan ancestors that they took them back
to Germany. (They were returned after the war.)